Archive for October, 2011

We all know about exploitingTomcat using WAR files. That usually involves accessing the Tomcat manager interface on the Tomcat HTTP(S) port. The fun and forgotten thing is, that you can also access that manager interface on port 8009. This the port that by default handles the AJP (Apache JServ Protocol) protocol:

What is JK (or AJP)?

AJP is a wire protocol. It an optimized version of the HTTP protocol to allow a standalone web server such as Apache to talk to Tomcat. Historically, Apache has been much faster than Tomcat at serving static content. The idea is to let Apache serve the static content when possible, but proxy the request to Tomcat for Tomcat related content.

Also interesting:

The ajp13 protocol is packet-oriented. A binary format was presumably chosen over the more readable plain text for reasons of performance. The web server communicates with the servlet container over TCP connections. To cut down on the expensive process of socket creation, the web server will attempt to maintain persistent TCP connections to the servlet container, and to reuse a connection for multiple request/response cycles

It’s not often that you encounter port 8009 open and port 8080,8180,8443 or 80 closed but it happens. In which case it would be nice to use existing tools like metasploit to still pwn it right? As stated in one of the quotes you can (ab)use Apache to proxy the requests to Tomcat port 8009. In the references you will find a nice guide on how to do that (read it first), what follows is just an overview of the commands I used on my own machine. I omitted some of the original instruction since they didn’t seem to be necessary.

Don’t forget to adjust worker.ajp13.host to the correct host. A nice side effect of using this setup is that you might thwart IDS/IPS systems in place since the AJP protocol is somewhat binary, but I haven’t verified this. Now you can just point your regular metasploit tomcat exploit to 127.0.0.1:80 and take over that system. Here is the metasploit output also: